Wambui Ippolito is an immigrant â she was born and spent her early childhood in East Africa â and this rising young New York horticulturist has a good grip on the crucial role that immigrants continue to play in shaping the American landscape. It is immigrants, after all, who have provided the backbone of our national landscaping industry since it first emerged in the 19th century. Scots and English gardeners gave way to Irish ones, and by the time I was learning the business 45 years ago, my mentors were mostly Southern Italians from Sicily and Napoli. They supplemented what I was taught in classes, tempering the ideal of informal English gardens held up to me by classroom instructors with a Southern Italian fondness for a more clipped and ordered landscape.